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Thomas Jefferson was so dismayed by political deceptions that he coined a word for it. “Twistifications” referred to a brew of willful misinformation, tortured logic, and artful language designed to sway credulous audiences.

This would be a good moment to resurrect Jefferson’s term—to better describe the “post-truth” Donald Trump, especially after Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway’s stunning reprises of Baghdad Bob at the White House over the past weekend. For while all presidents occasionally lie or mislead (Tonkin Gulf, Iran-Contra, WMD), this president so habitually and strategically dissembles—and then indignantly repeats the falsehood—that the word “lie” isn’t remotely adequate. He’s instead embodying the famous comment of one Bush 43 aide (later identified as Karl Rove) who candidly admitted to journalist Ron Suskind: “We create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—we’ll act again, creating other new realities.”

A close study of Trump’s standard twistifications (and those of his mini-me’s) over the past 18 months leads to the Anti-BS Detector for the Trump Era below. For Trump and Rove are essentially mimicking, consciously or not, “Orwellian” propaganda which George Orwell in 1984 described: “The Party” could change reality by repeatedly “insisting that lies are truth.”

Just Say No. When all federal intelligence agencies concluded that Putin hacked the Democrats, Trump at first went into deny, deny, deny mode — in effect, saying “ignore that man behind the [Iron] curtain.” When that became untenable, he instead adamantly denied that the Putin-WikiLeaks combination had any impact on the political outcome . . . which was odd, since he cited WikiLeaks 164 times during the campaign’s final month to denigrate Clinton. It appeared that Trump the candidate disagreed with the president-elect.

Just Say So. Why bother with evidence when “content bias” convinces “low education” supporters (his term) to swallow whole Trump’s self-confident declarations? The “tells” are easy to spot: “believe me…trust me…right?” The British have a phrase for this: “perhaps wrong but never in doubt.”

So Trump insists that millions voted illegally in November, thousands of Muslims cheered the collapse of the Twin Towers and there was a record turnout for his Inauguration (aerial photos notwithstanding). One week, he thinks the CIA is like “Nazi Germany” — the next week, he goes to Langley to say he “loves” them despite what the lying media reported. What contradiction?

This category includes those conclusory adjectives that he’s the “best, smartest, most successful” person around with “terrific, great” plans, not to mention really big hands and glands. O.K.?

Black Sheep. Imagine if a person implied that all sheep were black because he saw one. Universalizing the particular can work. Consider that quickly retracted report over last weekend that President Trump had moved the Martin Luther King bust out of the Oval Office, allowing his team to imply that one example proves a media conspiracy against them. Or any time a Republican says something blatantly or implicitly racial, for example, a Trumper will invariably ask “what about Bob Byrd?” (the West Virginia Democratic Senator who was briefly in the KKK in the ’30s before recanting).

So any stray stupid quote from any Democrat ever allows Trump allies try to explain away some blunder by maintaining that “both sides do it.” Like Reagan, Trump understands that anecdotage is more convincing than analysis.

Reverse Logic. Contrary to the scientific method of facts leading to conclusions, conclusions lead to facts in Trumpland. Since Iran is presumptively bad, he argues that a deal stopping it from developing a nuclear weapon for at least 180 months is worse than a nuclear-weapons break-out in three months. And since a major cornerstone of the GOP is the fossil fuel industry, that requires Trump to treat climate change as either a hoax or only a teeny weeny man-made inconvenience. For him, the ideological precedes the empirical.

BULLY Pulpit. There’s an old saw in the courtroom that if the facts are on your side, pound away at the facts; if logic is on your side, pound away at logic; if neither is on your side, pound the table. Hence all those tweets attacking anyone as an overrated loser, like that failed actress Meryl something and a local labor leader in Indiana who contradicted him. Powered originally by 17 million followers on Twitter and now the White House press apparatus, Trump can make potential critics think twice before speaking out.

False Comparatives. Trumpians can pretend that some craziness is exonerated by a different craziness. So he tried to tweet away Russia’s subversion of democracy because CNN’s Donna Brazile allegedly shared two questions with Hillary’s camp before a primary debate. Really? Brazile like Putin? Kellyanne Conway’s push back on possible Kremlin influence on the 2016 election was to claim that media bias also tilted the playing field, which blithely equates our First Amendment’s freedom of the press with espionage.

Word Play. President Lincoln cautioned audiences that “there’s a difference between a horse chestnut and a chestnut horse.” President George W. Bush understood that if he merely located “9/11” and “Saddam Hussein” in the same sentence, many listeners would — and did — correlate the two.

Notice, for example, how candidate Trump preemptively attacked others for things he himself engages in—psychologists call it “projection” —in order to neuter their use against him. Hence, he called Hillary Clinton “nasty…corrupt…liar…bigot…[a Putin] puppet.”

Shoot the Media Messengers. Skepticism about a particular story, journalist, or outlet is standard fare . . . but attacking “the Media” as “disgusting, dishonest, the worst” is quite simply an authoritarian tactic to sabotage a cornerstone of democracy. No president has gone so far. Nor was it reassuring when Trump joked at one campaign rally, “well, we won’t kill them [pause] . . . hmmm.”

There’s a method to his badness here—as his only press conference as president-elect showed, he now can merely shout, “fake news!” about any critical coverage and his core supporters will nod in unison.

Figures don’t lie, but liars figure. If you thought that no one would lie about specific, agreed-on numbers, you’d be mis-underestimating the 45th president. Hence, his claims that 85 percent of attacks on white victims are committed by blacks (it’s actually 15 percent) and that he won in a “landslide” (of minus 2.9 million votes), and his Inaugural had the biggest TV audience (except for those two others).

When Trump/Conway/Priebus/Spicer/Pence etc. rotate these twistificiations, they can erogenously excite a largely white, working-class base who reflect the axiom, “to the jaundiced eye, all looks yellow.” And they can easily fill 140 characters or a couple of sentences in a TV or radio interview.

Since Trump has been a successful dissembler for decades­—and inherits a GOP Congress reminiscent of Kipling’s “shut-eyed sentry”—one doubts he’ll now abandon the habits that have gotten him to the Oval Office. But the White House is not the 25th floor of Trump Tower. Can he get away with his multiple misdirections for 1,460 days of intense scrutiny?

Eventually, this tug-of-war between Trump’s Ministry of Disinformation and the “reality-based” media will have a winner. The “Party” couldn’t hold the USSR together, Mandela was freed, Miami is often under water, and already Trump is by far the most unpopular new president since polling began—and we’ve seen millions marching on January 21, with massive new energies directed toward resistance.

So if the #NeverTrumpers keep exposing daily his and their twistifications, I’m betting on the winning observation of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

Mark Green was NYC’s first Public Advocate. Among his 23 books is the recent Bright, Infinite Future: A Generational Memoir on the Progressive Rise.

With a deranged narcissist in the Oval Office and his lackey controlling the Department of Justice, there is no point in looking to the federal government to curb police violence. Instead, President Donald J. Trump will do everything in his power to encourage it. In the wake of protests over the murder of George Floyd, he has demanded that governors crack down on protestors: "You have to dominate. ... If you don't dominate, you're wasting your time," he told them.

Moreover, most local police authorities are under local control -- mayors, city councils, district attorneys, police chiefs, sheriffs. That's where the accountability for police misconduct begins.

<p>But Congress could take a significant step toward reining in that misconduct by passing a bill to end the practice of allowing the Pentagon to give surplus war equipment to local police departments. There is simply no good reason for police in any city -- from Washington to Wichita -- to roll down the streets in armored personnel carriers, armed with battering rams and grenade launchers. They are not going to war. American citizens are not enemy combatants.</p><p>Several Democrats have already announced their intention to introduce legislation to end the practice. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, has said he would introduce such a measure as an amendment to the all-important annual defense policy bill -- which would give it a decent shot at passing since Republicans are deeply invested in the defense bill.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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</script><p>After protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer, local law enforcement authorities took to the streets in armored carriers, further inflaming tensions. They showed little inclination toward restraint or de-escalation. The same thing is occurring in cities around the country right now.</p><p>Off-loading surplus military hardware to local police departments was never a good idea. The practice started back during the 1990s as violent crime peaked and local and federal authorities were feverishly devoted to winning the so-called war on drugs. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the program ramped up, doling out battlefield gear even to small towns no self-respecting terrorist ever heard of.</p><p>Law enforcement agents became enamored of images of themselves decked out like soldiers on special-ops missions. According to <em>The New York Times</em>, the website of a South Carolina sheriff's department featured its SWAT team "dressed in black with guns drawn, flanking an armored vehicle that looks like a tank and has a mounted .50-caliber gun."</p><p>Poor neighborhoods are subjected to the military-style hardware much more often than affluent ones. And the consequence of that sort of policing is often less safety, not more. When the police behave like an occupying force, the residents return the favor -- treating them with suspicion and contempt. That hardly makes it more likely that police will get the information they need to solve crimes.</p><p>The administration of President Barack Obama understood that and curbed the Pentagon program after Ferguson. In the final years of the Obama administration, the Pentagon reported that local law enforcement agencies had returned 126 tracked armored vehicles, 138 grenade launchers and 1,623 bayonets, the Times said. Pause for a moment just to consider that. Why would any police department -- even New York City's army of 36,000 officers -- need bayonets and grenade launchers? Once you implant in the heads of police officers the notion that they need battlefield gear, their use of violence against unarmed citizens escalates as a natural consequence.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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</script><p>But guess what happened when Trump took office? He removed Obama's restraints on the Pentagon program, once again allowing local law enforcement agents to go to battle against the citizens they are sworn to protect. No surprise there. In 2017, Trump gave a speech in which he urged police officers not to worry about injuring a suspect during an arrest.</p><p>Police violence against black people is a problem as old as the nation itself. It didn't start with Trump's presidency and won't end when it's over. Rather, the racist culture that is embedded among so many law enforcement agencies showed itself clearly when major police unions enthusiastically backed Trump's election. When Trump is finally gone, the campaign to eradicate that culture can begin in earnest.</p>